


Start the Count Anywhere

by PsychoPomposity



Category: Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Genre: Awkwardness, F/M, Sleep, Turnips, Yuletide, Yuletide 2012
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 15:58:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PsychoPomposity/pseuds/PsychoPomposity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly and Schmendrick mutilate some vegetables and discuss sawing oneself in half.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Start the Count Anywhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leiascully](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/gifts).



She was in love, and in love time lost what little meaning it could have for her. Whilst the past several months of travel had left her newly attuned to the passing of seasons, she had not yet grasped the functionality of clocks or calendars, and all of Schmedrick's attempts to explain their utility had been met with blithe koans about eternity or ineffable smiles. He had feared that she might actually catch on once she became human, but Lir soon saw her timeless again, dragging her back into an eternal Spring as if to spite the Hagsgate countryside, which seemed forever determined to strangle anything verdant or springlike which dared trespass there. Love, it seemed, was never out of season, even in a land where every season was barrenness.

Molly asked the Lady Amalthea once if she know how long it had been since their arrival, and she laughed before she admitted that it had not crossed her mind. She was both comforted and discomforted by the remark, for it spoke both to her waning sense of urgency and to her ongoing sense of inhumanity. Lir too, lived timelessly after a fashion, although he had been born and did remain as painfully human as any man who knows he might die.

"I had an insane uncle who once tried to murder time," he had said when Molly made mention of his beloved's forgetfulness, "I think it passed too heavily on him as he feared what it might bring. We two, having no desire for anything but present, probably make a better job of slaying it."

Amalthea giggled softly at this, although Molly was uncertain what to make of the anecdote. It ended in the sort of cliche that the boy was prone to falling into if given leave to speak long enough, and she was rather certain that he'd already mentioned three other uncles of varying degrees of insanity beforehand. 

Time, however it passed by the lady of the castle, laid especially heavy in the meantime on her back and upon Schmendrick's, as they had a constant monotony of pots, potatoes and exploding card decks to manage and could not afford much respite from their master's dictates. It was, admittedly, a more consistent position than she had enjoyed amongst the greenwood, but with constancy came repetition, and she found her time packed with the same toil of cleaning and cookery day in and day out, without the respite of starvation or encroaching constabulary to break up the cycle. 

Schmendrick, at the very least, found some variety in having to invent new impossibilities each day, although this probably gave him a more acute sense of desperation than boredom gave her. He seemed to stumble into the kitchen at a later hour each night after performing and to thereafter bother Molly to a later hour each morning with questions and anxieties concerning whatever feat he had been commanded to perform the next day.

"He asked me to saw myself in half tomorrow. Apparently the village girl from last week was insufficient."

“Well just be sure you can put yourself back together at the end. One of the men at arms inexplicably managed to hit the roe hind they were aiming for, and I'll have enough trouble taking it apart tomorrow without having to put you back together on top of it.”

He laughed glumly and assured her that he was certain -mostly certain- that the illusion wouldn't put him at any risk of actual dismemberment. Molly rolled her eyes but stopped short of saying anything more. She had few things she could think to say that weren't either barbed or breaking character, and she didn't have the energy to think of how to correctly reassure and/or ridicule a man facing this particular predicament.

The topic changed and the night (or more likely early morning) wore on. Molly managed to scrape the adamantine crust off of the soup pot before the birds started singing and Schmendrick did his best in between lamentations to help where he could. He peeled some insignificant portion of the kitchen's nigh institutional pile of turnips before he was shooed away - Molly having noticed that he was in some danger of slicing himself in two half a day early.

They talked more after that. About bulls and skulls and rhinoceroses and other such pressing matters, most likely. He remembered little of the content, save that he unintentionally ended in a declaration that he was going to lie down ( _justforaminute_ ) on the pallet in the corner, after which he intended firmly to get up and make the trek back to his own chambers. He awoke to find cloudy beams of sunshine making visible the dense dust of the small chamber, and realized with no shortage of awkwardity that he had indecorously collapsed in a woman's bed and that this _faux pas_ had not prevented her from collapsing in it on her own at some later point, no doubt forgetting that it was occupied.

He was still either very tired or mostly asleep, and he was uncertain as to whether he ought attempt to remove himself and risk waking her or attempt to wake her and risk a more permanent sort of removal altogether. He gulped as he quietly recalled the assortment of dull but somehow still effectual cutlery which the kitchen contained, and concluded that the least immediately dangerous course of action was to remain completely still and do absolutely nothing. It was obviously not a solution to the situation, but he could rationalize that this time staying motionless was being used in strategic contemplation of the no doubt very clever escape to come.

Molly turned in her sleep, and Schmendrick did his best not to flinch as she lazily stretched her dust covered arm overtop him, awkwardly sprawling such that an uninformed observer might mistake their position as an embrace. He was trapped! His careful strategizing ruined all in an instant! He thought dolorously of the turnips he'd so mutilated just a few hours prior – skinned, beheaded and quartered – and was stung with a new found sympathy for their plight.

After a few more moments, he decided that strategy had never been his strong suit and resolved to lie absolutely still with a touch more fatalism - and resigned now that he could not avoid disaster, he decided that the interim between the “now” and the terrible “then” wasn't particularly bad. Molly was... warm, if nothing else, and lying next to her was decidedly more comfortable than the threadbare bedding of his room in the drafty southern tower (He was a wizard... of course they'd put him in a tower). She seemed to lose some of her sharpness and grow softer while asleep, and took on a very pleasant expression, being unaware of herself. 

All things considered, it wasn't the worst place he'd fallen asleep where he oughtn't. He counted out the seconds as he waited for the cock to crow, and rehearsed apologies in the back of his brain. As he did, Molly unconsciously turned her head closer to his face. Through the skin of her tan wrist, laid across his neck, he could make out the faint tempo of her pulse. It threw him off count as soon as he noticed it, beating out a fast staccato that tripped up his thoughts. It took him a few seconds before he reached a rather startling conclusion: no human heart beats that quickly while at rest.

And there it was. She was awake. He was awake. Neither could or would say a thing about it. He turned his head toward hers and closed his eyes again, not wanting to break the illusion, but ever gradually, ever slowly moving his head a little farther in her direction, as one might do unknowingly in sleep, imagining the somewhat outrageous outcome that might proceed from this charade – that their lips might by some accident touch.

They did not. Not quite. It went this way for a while, and impatiently his eyes fluttered open again, finding hers gazing back into them, soft and deep as the sea that beat against the rocks below. His heart, if he guessed correctly, kept good pace with hers. In what seemed to be the longest five and a half seconds of his life, he thought to do something almost certainly foolish, but was interrupted as a large scraggly mass of fur, claws and gristle landed unceremoniously upon his face, causing him to shout as the cat mewled for its breakfast. 

Molly laughed, and finally waking in earnest she shuffled away from where Schemdrick lay still confounded as he tried to extricate the animal from his body. There was a moment after that and before he half-ran wordlessly from the room that she thought he might say something, but it passed quickly, such that she was uncertain as if it had ever really been present at all.


End file.
